New partnership for Social Care announced with Care Hires
Sona and Care Hires announce an exciting partnership.
Building a staff schedule couldn’t be easier.
Reduce payroll errors with real-time T&A.
Fill 50% more shifts with your own employees.
Ensure shifts are covered even if you're understaffed.
Manage absence requests and approvals.
Practical ways to boost team morale with proven examples from across the sector.
Find out what care employees say matters to them most at work.
Search and view employees with customised permission levels.
Key employment information all in one place.
Store visas, professional certifications and more with easy access.
Control personal and operational details of your staff.
Why are people leaving Social Care, and where are they going?
We asked 250 Social Care leaders about their attitudes towards digitisation and their plans for the next 12 months...
Why are Hospitality workers leaving the industry, and what can you do to retain them?
Share updates with a single click.
Staff can see relevant messages in one place.
Request post-shift feedback from staff.
Recognise staff contributions by sending them praise.
Identify staff at risk of churning.
How care organisations can embrace flexible working and thrive.
Maintain quality of care and reduce costs.
Maximise profitability through AI-powered forecasting & scheduling.
Elevate your operational efficiency and guest satisfaction.
Streamline operations across sites.
Developed alongside Social Care experts with decades of combined experience.
See why we are the leading user-friendly, end-to-end platform that prioritises both efficiency and wellbeing.
The Sona Partner Network is an ecosystem of solution experts and complementary technologies.
Give staff greater visibility of shifts available to work, with a simple "shift claim" process to increase their income.
Improve employee engagement and retention with a seamless employee communication platform.
Happier staff provide greater customer experiences, which in turn drives return rates, revenues and recommendations.
Give staff greater visibility of shifts available to work, with a simple "shift claim" process to increase their income.
Improve employee engagement and retention with a seamless employee communication platform.
Happier staff provide greater customer experiences, which in turn drives return rates, revenues and recommendations.
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New research, insights, and strategies for frontline leaders.
Downloadable templates, reports and guides from Sona.
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Sona and Care Hires announce an exciting partnership.
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Insight, Social Care, Scheduling
What is 'under-contracting' (or under-contracted hours)?
3 minute read
A number of our customers (across industries) have challenges ensuring their contracted teams work the hours they’re committed to. It could be that variances in shift length mean that a staff member's weekly or monthly hours worked don't tally with their contracted weekly/monthly hours.
In large organisations this can add up to a significant difference in hours paid for compared to hours actually worked, with serious consequences for the bottom line.
Let’s say our fictional care home operator has 1000 permanent shift-based care staff. For simplicity we have based the calculations on an average annual salary of £16,164 and an average of 31 hours a week.
If the proportion of actual hours worked to scheduled across all 1000 staff drops just 0.5% (from 100% to 99.5%), over a year this is equivalent to 930 unworked 8 hour shifts, or almost 1 missed shift per staff member.
The cumulative cost in contracted hours paid for but not worked is over £80,000, and that’s before factoring in paying overtime or agency staff costs to cover unfilled shifts. This is a big payroll challenge as variances in these unplanned costs are hard to predict accurately.
Many of the biggest and most obvious disruptors of our customers’ rotas (sickness/unplanned absence, COVID protocols) are unpredictable and happen with little notice. There are a number of reasons why this is more troublesome for frontline workforces than for desk-based companies.
With so many moving parts, and with managers constantly preoccupied with finding shift cover, schedules that had been carefully crafted just one week earlier can quickly look different once they come into direct contact with reality.
Traditional workforce management / rostering / scheduling systems are great for creating and optimising rotas. But many haven’t built in the necessary flexibility to accommodate the practical challenges faced by scheduling managers on a daily basis.
Static schedules don’t give managers full visibility of who is available to cover or change shifts, or who has already agreed to do so.
Finally, most of these systems were built with a ‘top-down’ perspective and aren’t user-friendly, so they don’t empower frontline management and staff to take control of their schedules.
Because our technology focuses on the end user experience, we’re taking a completely different approach to managing frontline teams.. We’re building a truly modular system (with modular pricing), so that the technology we put in our customer’s hands fits their operating model and fixes the problems they need to solve.
Our answer is Sona's ‘Open Shifts’ module. Open Shifts is designed to fix 75% of the major problems created by the lack of effective rostering, but with lower cost and administrative requirements both centrally and at the location manager level.
Think of Open Shifts as ‘rostering in reverse’. Our goal is to improve overall schedule and individual shift visibility at all levels of the organisation by enabling real time alerts and instant booking of additional shifts made available through Sona. We believe this is the key to reducing payroll overspend, whether that’s due to under-contracting, overspending on agencies, or the cost of excessive staff churn.
When a shift cannot be filled by an available team member, the shift is automatically pushed (via a mobile notification) to all currently employed team members first, whether they are full time, part time or relief teams - to reduce agency spend at the point of need.
Our customer success team will ensure the analytics we provide to you can show contracted staff are being utilised on a daily/weekly basis.
On average, we have seen agency spend reductions of up to 20%, often within months of customers going live. Other advantages of Open Shifts include:
All new customers are welcome to try Open Shifts as part of a no obligation free trial of Sona.
We are constantly building new functionality for some of the UK’s largest employers, so we can offer you access to new features/modules as and when you need them without the need for an upfront commitment.
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4 min read
Learn how Sona's shift management software and employee app are delivering significant ROI for our social care customers, including helping them to cut staffing agency spending by up to 40%
3 min read
How streamlining shift management with Sona has transformed Praxis Care's operations, given valuable time back to managers, and reduced costs.
14 min read
Sona's Head of Product for Health & Social Care explores how modern workforce technology can take a leading role in boosting frontline staff engagement.